Friday, August 29, 2008

Why you should (still) be a socialist

Communism died on this day in 1991. Following the dissolution of the the so-called Communist Party of the Soviet Union, some six days later Le Monde informed us:

"Communism is dead - the word, the party, the empire, the theology, it's all dead and everyone is happy...Mr Gorbachev was the timorous individual who started the progress...on the road which history had forced upon him, into the brilliant sunshine of the market economy. Are not the communists, if any are left, blind men and women who never understood that capitalism has taken over human destiny, that there would no longer be a Revolution but rather an eternal reform making the rich a little less rich, the poor a little less poor, not overnight but through the patient work of centuries, promising freedom and bread for all?"

Le Monde's view was a typical example of the myth-making media at work. The Socialist Standard of October 1991 replied to such nonsense unequivocally:

"The fundamental error - more than error: grand deception - upon which such reasoning is based is twofold. Firstly, the Leninist revolutions did not remove capitalism. Secondly, "the brilliant sunshine of the market" still does not shine upon the workers who form the majority of the world's population; on the contrary, we live under black clouds of debt, poverty, pollution, war, mass starvation, economic anxiety, all of which are direct consequences of the system of production for profit."

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